/lit/ - Literature

>>12431294
one of the things that i like about Kojima's lore is how willing it is to embrace *absurdity* rather than truth, or Meaning. that we should recognize that there is no peace to be found, and yet not allow ourselves to slide consequently into the glorification of war, is a sense which is both true and profound. equally so is Kojima's own 'deconstruction' of the action genre: that if it is true that *to look like the Boss is to be the Boss* also means that looking like the Boss means you inherit the Boss's problems. in other words, simulate carefully. be careful what you impersonate, because if you impersonate well, someone else is likely to believe you. but this is boring moralism.

what is quite wonderful about the MG lore is how much it revels in its own ridiculousness. were it otherwise we wouldn't be able to have as much fun with it as we do. we wouldn't have the decoys and cardboard boxes and other hilarity that we get in TPP. it is the *humorlessness* of militancy - not necessarily militarism - which is its worst aspect. whether it is John Calvin, or the Grand Inquisitor, or - for all of his laughter - Kefka, the double bind presents itself: the genuinely funny, or surprising, is always in a space between sincerity and absurdity. that is the space open to the world, which is the genuinely human one.

even war, Kojima seems to say, will not solve your problems. the personalities you encounter in war are no less ridiculous, untethered, homeless or confused than those you encounter Back Home, in the world you were attempting to escape from. a world of ridiculousness, of conspiracy theories which are preposterously weird, is always preferable to those which, in their deadly earnestness, reveal only psychoanalytic truths, which are the truths of confession, redemption and atonement. this is Sphinx terrain.

but Kojima's antagonists really conceal nothing, they're not capable of it. they are as transparent as WWE wrestlers, and good lord do they ever love talking. they're all fetishists, in particular ways, but there is no sense of condemnation for this, no secret or revealed truth beneath it. you just have to enjoy being overwhelmed by the comedy of it all. in the place of the One Thing, a billion substitutes, not unlike our world. and yet, for whatever reason, that world satisfies. in The Dark Knight, Batman has to crush his own impersonators, for their own good; the Boss, by contrast, *multiplies* them.

why is that?